Re:Good book about Pi
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
I second this. I read quite a lot of popular-science books, and the subject of pi didn't seem too fresh, but it turned out a nice and quirky read on the history of math overall. The author shows his geek/hacker personality quite a lot, whereas most writers of this genre seem to pretty much hide it.
why? Just cos I have 160 GB of storage doesn't mean I want to read/write the entire of it at once.
You can't just write a set of data "at once". You're limited by Planck time, so the physics bottleneck of writing that 160 GB is about 2970000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 bytes/s. Nothing to brag about.
Windows and Xboxes use DirectX. The rest of the world, including consoles, seems to use OpenGL. So the problem of porting games from non-MS consoles to Linux must be something else than the 3D API.
Even command-line users pretty much all run their terminals under a windowing system these days. Even if they use traditional editors like emacs and vi, most people default to using versions of those that take advantage of the features that GUI environments provide. And how many people do you think browse Slashdot from the command-line? Methinks the number is small.
On the other hand, windowed GUIs don't ditch the use of text altogether. For example reading your post and writing this answer are good old text-based activities, even though they look and feel slightly different from the old text terminal. Same goes for most office applications, IMHO. The GUI is also a convenient way of running text-based things, not a completely new paradigm.
I imagine most consumer upload capacity is sitting unused. Of course the ISP pays for its external traffic, but a lot of P2P traffic can stay within one ISP and therefore save those external links.
Both Intel and AMD used a shared cache design with a single connection to the system bus (FSB and HT, respectively). In the case of AMD, it also means a shared memory controller.
I thought I just said that, though you're being more precise with the terms.
It seems to me that the shared cache is a necessity borne out of the shared outside connection (FSB/HT). Thus, when you try to save space and money by putting two CPUs on the same die, you end up with the dual core design.
Perhaps I don't view L2/3 cache (and possibly memory controller) as the defining parts of a CPU. I'm assuming the rest of the CPU, the actual processing unit, hasn't changed much, but I could be wrong.
My first thought from the headline was Unruh effect. It's a kind of Hawking radiation you can get in a particle accelerator. It just happens that with black holes, the acceleration is due to gravity, but other sources of acceleration also work. There are huge decelerations from c to nearly 0 at heavy ion collisions, for example.
I first heard of the effect when some fellow physicists were considering the idea of tiny black holes created in particle physics experiments. It turned out that the presence of Hawking-like radiation doesn't necessarily mean a black hole.
Well, it also turns out that this has nothing directly to do with the article, but might be +i, interesting nevertheless.
Don't dual core CPUs share components (cache maybe?) that an aware OS can exploit for performance improvements?
The same way an HT CPU shows up as 2 CPUs (with disasterous effects) unless the OS is away and can properly exploit it?
Some dual cores share L2/3 cache, but not all. Another important factors are the shared connections to external world, such as memory. So I presume inter-CPU communication is faster, but external communication can be slower.
That aside, HT is a hack which should not be compared to dual core systems at all. In fact, "dual core processor" is a rather silly marketing term, because it means "two processors on one piece of silicon". In other words, you could interpret the phrase "dual-core CPU" as "a CPU that contains two CPUs".
Imagine the universe is empty space, not counting yourself. Can you feel yourself moving? Can you even consider the idea of moving in an otherwise empty space? How about rotating -- that would imply acceleration.
This sort of thinking leads to the idea that acceleration is, in fact, relative: it's relative to the rest of the universe.
>Perhaps that is part of the reason why we americans do not rate very highly on the global happiness scale.
Really? You all look happy (or is the grin genetic?) and are always saying how great it is to be American. Seriously, is this true? I'd always assumed American's to be a fairly happy if slightly crazy bunch on the whole. Certainly all the ones I know are frighteningly chipper and full of energy. Tires me out just talking to them.
To me, the epitome of a happy person is someone like Buddha or Tux. An almost complete antithesis of the forcedly-happy-on-the-outside Americans.
There is also about a $100 price difference between those two chips. I imagine they are manufactured to different quality standards. The mobile chip probably has less leakage or something to that effect.
Good point. But I'm still seeing problems. "Desktop" and "mobile" CPUs use different sockets, so you can't just invest in a "mobile" CPU to save power in your "desktop" motherboard. Common sense and standards would unify the two sockets, right? Just like you can invest in a fluorescent bulb to save energy in the long run, as it fits in the same socket as an incandescent bulb. Legislation in some countries is heading towards the banning of incandescent bulbs, so why not ban these space-heater CPUs?
Incidentally, I've been using Mini-ITX mobos with "mobile" CPUs for some time now, and I wish they would be more generally available, with global warming and all that. Funnily enough, it looks like "desktop" CPUs are the new Celerons; I'm thinking of the Celeron M that's cheaper than Pentium M but lacks some of the power saving features.
such as "desktop" CPUs. Why are these still being produced, when the "mobile" variants of the same models are much more efficient? For example, look at these two:
Both of them are Core 2 Duos, 65 nm process, 2 GHz, 2 MB cache. But one of them is a "desktop" model, and I wonder what the hell it's doing to waste almost double the power of the "mobile" one.
Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone would like integrated Intel graphics that have full opensource drivers available in your friendly neighbourhood distro.
The problem with libraries is that only one person can borrow a copy at a time, which is silly with modern technology. My pet peeve is with scratched music CDs, it would be great if the library archived the originals and loaned out CDR copies, for example. Though there are probably a bazillion laws against that.
This is the second time this week I've noticed someone moan about their overuse of Latter Day Saints. What the feck is going on? Has the overuse of Lysergic Software Distribution clouded your mind?
Before patents, businesses and inventors used secrecy instead of law to protect their IP. Patents are meant to encourage the publishing of inventions, while reserving _commercial_ rights for a limited time. Copyrights serve a similar purpose, even if their current form reflects something else.
Without copyright and GPL, businesses can take our code, improve on it, and release closed-source products.
However, things like GPL and CC are licenses. I'm pretty sure people can agree on terms of use even without copyrights and patents.
It should be noted that the Linux version of Acrobat Reader seems fairly antiquated compared with its Windows counterpart. The last time I used acroread I was unable to fill PDF forms with it.
Actually it has worked with PDF forms for quite some time. The latest version I have (8.1.2) feels pretty nice and unixy overall. Of course it's still binary for i386, but it's much better than before.
Wikipedia says: "10 Gigabit Ethernet abandons half duplex links and repeaters (and the CSMA/CD that goes with them) in favor of a system of purely full duplex links connected by switches as was already the normal practice with gigabit Ethernet."
I'm pretty sure this was first mentioned in the book version of "2010: Odyssey Two", IIRC.
I second (pun intended) this. IIRC, Jupiter was converted into a sun, so there must have been discussion on its chemical composition. OTOH, 2061 was about Halley's comet.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. I read quite a lot of popular-science books, and the subject of pi didn't seem too fresh, but it turned out a nice and quirky read on the history of math overall. The author shows his geek/hacker personality quite a lot, whereas most writers of this genre seem to pretty much hide it.
You can't just write a set of data "at once". You're limited by Planck time, so the physics bottleneck of writing that 160 GB is about 2970000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 bytes/s. Nothing to brag about.
Kids these days.
Windows and Xboxes use DirectX. The rest of the world, including consoles, seems to use OpenGL. So the problem of porting games from non-MS consoles to Linux must be something else than the 3D API.
On the other hand, windowed GUIs don't ditch the use of text altogether. For example reading your post and writing this answer are good old text-based activities, even though they look and feel slightly different from the old text terminal. Same goes for most office applications, IMHO. The GUI is also a convenient way of running text-based things, not a completely new paradigm.
I imagine most consumer upload capacity is sitting unused. Of course the ISP pays for its external traffic, but a lot of P2P traffic can stay within one ISP and therefore save those external links.
Note to self: never drink and /.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/05/149231
I am Cornhawkio! I need TP for my blackhole!
I thought I just said that, though you're being more precise with the terms.
It seems to me that the shared cache is a necessity borne out of the shared outside connection (FSB/HT). Thus, when you try to save space and money by putting two CPUs on the same die, you end up with the dual core design. Perhaps I don't view L2/3 cache (and possibly memory controller) as the defining parts of a CPU. I'm assuming the rest of the CPU, the actual processing unit, hasn't changed much, but I could be wrong.
My first thought from the headline was Unruh effect. It's a kind of Hawking radiation you can get in a particle accelerator. It just happens that with black holes, the acceleration is due to gravity, but other sources of acceleration also work. There are huge decelerations from c to nearly 0 at heavy ion collisions, for example.
I first heard of the effect when some fellow physicists were considering the idea of tiny black holes created in particle physics experiments. It turned out that the presence of Hawking-like radiation doesn't necessarily mean a black hole.
Well, it also turns out that this has nothing directly to do with the article, but might be +i, interesting nevertheless.
The same way an HT CPU shows up as 2 CPUs (with disasterous effects) unless the OS is away and can properly exploit it?
Some dual cores share L2/3 cache, but not all. Another important factors are the shared connections to external world, such as memory. So I presume inter-CPU communication is faster, but external communication can be slower.
That aside, HT is a hack which should not be compared to dual core systems at all. In fact, "dual core processor" is a rather silly marketing term, because it means "two processors on one piece of silicon". In other words, you could interpret the phrase "dual-core CPU" as "a CPU that contains two CPUs".
Imagine the universe is empty space, not counting yourself. Can you feel yourself moving? Can you even consider the idea of moving in an otherwise empty space? How about rotating -- that would imply acceleration.
This sort of thinking leads to the idea that acceleration is, in fact, relative: it's relative to the rest of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach's_principlePerhaps you should start keeping a journal about it.
To me, the epitome of a happy person is someone like Buddha or Tux. An almost complete antithesis of the forcedly-happy-on-the-outside Americans.
Good point. But I'm still seeing problems. "Desktop" and "mobile" CPUs use different sockets, so you can't just invest in a "mobile" CPU to save power in your "desktop" motherboard. Common sense and standards would unify the two sockets, right? Just like you can invest in a fluorescent bulb to save energy in the long run, as it fits in the same socket as an incandescent bulb. Legislation in some countries is heading towards the banning of incandescent bulbs, so why not ban these space-heater CPUs?
Incidentally, I've been using Mini-ITX mobos with "mobile" CPUs for some time now, and I wish they would be more generally available, with global warming and all that. Funnily enough, it looks like "desktop" CPUs are the new Celerons; I'm thinking of the Celeron M that's cheaper than Pentium M but lacks some of the power saving features.
such as "desktop" CPUs. Why are these still being produced, when the "mobile" variants of the same models are much more efficient? For example, look at these two:
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLA98
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLA49
Both of them are Core 2 Duos, 65 nm process, 2 GHz, 2 MB cache. But one of them is a "desktop" model, and I wonder what the hell it's doing to waste almost double the power of the "mobile" one.
Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone would like integrated Intel graphics that have full opensource drivers available in your friendly neighbourhood distro.
The problem with libraries is that only one person can borrow a copy at a time, which is silly with modern technology. My pet peeve is with scratched music CDs, it would be great if the library archived the originals and loaned out CDR copies, for example. Though there are probably a bazillion laws against that.
This is the second time this week I've noticed someone moan about their overuse of Latter Day Saints. What the feck is going on? Has the overuse of Lysergic Software Distribution clouded your mind?
Before patents, businesses and inventors used secrecy instead of law to protect their IP. Patents are meant to encourage the publishing of inventions, while reserving _commercial_ rights for a limited time. Copyrights serve a similar purpose, even if their current form reflects something else.
Without copyright and GPL, businesses can take our code, improve on it, and release closed-source products.
However, things like GPL and CC are licenses. I'm pretty sure people can agree on terms of use even without copyrights and patents.
It should be noted that the Linux version of Acrobat Reader seems fairly antiquated compared with its Windows counterpart. The last time I used acroread I was unable to fill PDF forms with it.
Actually it has worked with PDF forms for quite some time. The latest version I have (8.1.2) feels pretty nice and unixy overall. Of course it's still binary for i386, but it's much better than before.
Wikipedia says: "10 Gigabit Ethernet abandons half duplex links and repeaters (and the CSMA/CD that goes with them) in favor of a system of purely full duplex links connected by switches as was already the normal practice with gigabit Ethernet."
81 lunabits per second.
I second (pun intended) this. IIRC, Jupiter was converted into a sun, so there must have been discussion on its chemical composition. OTOH, 2061 was about Halley's comet.